nd Menelaus do not die, they are too near
akin to Zeus; they dwell immortal, not among the shadows of heroes and of
famous ladies dead and gone, but in Elysium, the paradise at the world's
end, unvisited by storms.

"Beyond these voices there is peace."

It is plain that, as a love-story, the tale of Paris and Helen must to
modern readers seem meagre. To Greece, in every age, the main interest
lay not in the passion of the beautiful pair, but in its world-wide
consequences: the clash of Europe and Asia, the deaths of kings, the ruin
wrought in their homes, the consequent fall of the great and ancient
Achaean civilisation. To the Greeks, the Trojan war was what the
Crusades are in later history. As in the Crusades, the West assailed the
East for an ideal, not to recover the Holy Sepulchre of our religion, but
to win back the living type of beauty and of charm. Perhaps, ere the sun
grows cold, men will no more believe in the Crusades, as an historical
fact, than we do in the siege of Troy. In a sense, a very obvious sense,
the myth of Helen is a parable of Hellenic history. They sought beauty,
and they found it; they bore it home, and, with beauty, their bane.
Wherever Helen went "she brought calamity," in this a type of all the
famous and peerless ladies of old days, of Cleopatra and of Mary Stuart.
Romance and poetry have nothing less plausible than the part which
Cleopatra actually played in the history of the world, a world well lost
by Mark Antony for her sake. The flight from Actium might seem as much a
mere poet's dream as the gathering of the Achaeans at Aulis, if we were
not certain that it is truly chronicled.

From the earliest times, even from times before Homer (whose audience is
supposed to know all about Helen), the imagination of Greece, and later,
the imagination of the civilised world, has played around Helen, devising
about her all that possibly could be devised. She was the daughter of
Zeus by Nemesis, or by Leda; or the daughter of the swan, or a child of
the changeful moon, brooding on "the formless and multi-form waters." She
could speak in the voices of all women, hence she was named "Echo," and
we might fancy that, like the witch of the Brocken, she could appear to
every man in the likeness of his own first love. The ancient Egyptians
either knew her, or invented legends of her to amuse the inquiring
Greeks. She had touched at Sidon, and perhaps Astaroth is only her
Sidonian name.